“Don't we all discover, at some stage or another that there are some things we'll never get any better at, even though we have no idea why and hardly ever notice it when it happens, even though we may have… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room,… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“I didn't like what that word-'childhood'-conjured up, or rather, I didn't like the way most people use it: that presumption of innocence and starry-eyed… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“But if neither sadness or rage could unite us, I didn't know what could - the more I wanted to identify with her, the… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“I heard a song that nailed it: "And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I'd get such a shock… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“I dismissed this course of action, sensing my own reserves of strengths, but I experimented with the idea and took it as far as… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“She was the living effigy of everything we will never be and, in every sense of the word, she was the retard that I… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“She understood nothing, she learned nothing, so she just stood there, lively sometimes, joyful even, a groundless joy that brought tears to their eyes,… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“Here, too, I recognized-easily, from firsthand experience, since this kind of thing happened at my age-the heat of the moment, the very instant you… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“When in doubt, do what they do in books, was one of Gabriel's secret mottos and - that rarest of things - a principle… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“The notion of this powerful childhood gaze was all the more specious given that adults, in the name of that very spontaneity, subjected chidren… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
“Don't we all discover, at some stage or another that there are some things we'll never get any better at, even though we have… — Jean-Christophe Valtat Copy Share Image
